5 Ways to Automate Your Nutrition

One of the most important aspects for optimizing your health, your physique, and your overall function is nutrition. Think about it: nutrition affects energy levels, our activity, our mind, and our productivity. Unfortunately it is one area of our lives that seems to be overlooked or placed on the back burner. How many times do we find ourselves in a time crunch and grab the first thing in sight? Or the latter, we don’t eat and then later find ourselves ravaged and in turn we eat anything and possibly everything in sight? We do our best to eat “healthy” and exercise when we can, but it can be a daunting task, and often our waistline tells us we haven’t been doing as well as we thought we were. Eating for fat-loss takes work and time, but it can be simplified. Below are a five fundamental tactics I use to automate my nutrition from day to day to help promote fat-loss while conserving mental energy:

Choose Calorie-Free Beverages. This is a super easy way to shrink your waistline, improve your health, as well as help you transform your physique. Being honest, cutting out (back significantly) sugary beverages and alcohol can make a huge difference in your appearance as well as your waistline. It might be a challenge at first, but once you commit to water, unsweetened tea, coffee and other calorie free beverages, you will see results. Once you tell yourself I am only going to have 2 glasses of wine on Saturday, or 2 beers during the football game – it becomes easier to cut back or eliminate added calories and unwanted hormonal responses from alcohol.

Dummy Proof the Office. When mid-afternoon hunger hits: pack up your own snack drawer. Whether it’s bags of protein powder, protein bars, portioned bags of almonds, etc. to keep on hand. These are all back up ideas that can be kept in a drawer and used to help keep your nutrition on track when hunger hits.

Give your kitchen a makeover. One of the most important ways you can automate your nutrition is to make it over, literally. Keep out appliances that will help you reach you goals. The blender, protein powder, and daily supplements stay out on the counter, which serve as a reminder. If you were to open my refrigerator you would see eggs, chicken, a filled vegetable drawer, almond milk, and almond butter, with some condiments. The idea here is to only keep around what you will eat that aligns with your nutrition goals. Anything extra (junk food) will just serve as temptation and when you are tired and worn out, will be much harder to resist. Obviously if you have kids your refrigerator might be a little different, but in this case keep your foods separate from theirs – only chose from your foods! Ideally though your kids food should be as healthy as yours for the most part.

Standing appointments with the grocery store. That’s right – treat going to the grocery store just as if you were having a meeting at work or an appointment at the gym! Doesn’t matter when, but make it a point to get there, preferably at the same time each week with the same list. The idea here is that it because automatic. Usually, when I go in the store, it takes me about 10 minutes tops because I know exactly what I need. This also prevents me from browsing the aisles and picking up foods that I do not need and aren’t inline with my nutrition goals. Stick to the perimeter and only buy the healthy foods you need.

Dining out menu is the same, no matter what restaurant. I do not mean this 100% literally, but almost. What this means is, no matter where you are eating, know ahead of time that you will be choosing a protein and a vegetable for your meal. Whether that is a salad with dressing on the side or fish with a side of double vegetables – it is essentially the same at any restaurant. If you can adopt this mindset, it can allow you to enjoy going out to eat without consuming copious amounts of calories from unhealthy dishes.

I hope this provides a starting point for helping you stay with your nutrition and physique goals! Proper nutrition for fat-loss doesn’t have to be a daunting, time-consuming task, use these five ways to automate your nutrition today!

I look forward to hearing from you! Tweet me your automated nutrition tips at @CROSSFITHARDGYM or leave me a message on Facebook!

Have a great day,

Coach Graham

Open Prep WOD

Favorite game?

Rowling Warm Up

Rowling is a rowing competition (game) that uses a similar format to that of a game of bowling.

Each athlete will row 5 “frames”. The goal for each frame is to stop the meter counter as close to a designated distance as possible.

For example, if the designated number is 100m; if at the end of the “frame” the counter reads 102m, the score for that frame is 2. The score would be the same if the counter read 98m. If the counter stops on 100m, the score for the frame is 0 and would thus be equivalent to a strike in bowling. The goal is to have the lowest score for each round and the lowest accumulated score for the game.

Sounds fairly simple! The rules are as follows:– You are only allowed full strokes.

– Once you stop rowing, you are done rowing for the frame and the handle must be put back in the catch before the meter counter comes to a complete stop.

– The winner of “each frame” will be awarded the opportunity to pick a body weight movement (i.e. burpees, pull ups, push ups) to be completed by everyone else who did not win the frame. The number of reps is equal to sum of the 2 highest scores for each frame.

– The winner of the “game” is the person with the lowest overall score when each frame is added together. The winner of the “game” also may choose a body weight exercise for everybody to complete that is equivalent to the sum of the 2 highest overall scores.

Most importantly, have fun!!!

Todays designated distance for each frame is 100m!

Work in teams of 3 or more.

Enjoy!

Deadlift

Take 12-15 minutes and build to a heavy, but not necessarily 3-RM Deadlift

Fitness and exercise disclaimer for CrossFit Hard. We are a CrossFit gym located in North Bethesda, MD offering well-designed programs, expert coaching, personal training, killer workouts, and a strong community to help you get fit. Go hard or go home.